Students from Newtown, Connecticut perform "Over the Rainbow" during a Good Morning America appearance on January 15 (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

Twice a month, a panel of dads discusses a topic of the moment. For today's conversation, they talk about how they regulate their children's media consumption. Part one of the discussion is below; parts two and three are here and here.

A few years ago, I received a letter from my son's preschool informing me that one of his teachers had committed suicide. The school administrators offered few details of the tragedy, but did inform me that they would not tell the children of the young woman's death, but only that she had unexpectedly moved to another city, sadly without being able to say goodbye.

This sparked a furious round of emails on the class listserv, with the consensus among my fellow parents being that the truth should not be withheld. My ex-wife and I, however, found ourselves of the minority opinion, and in rare agreement with each other: We preferred our son not know. He was still three, largely pre-verbal, a wide-eyed reflecting pool of a child who broadcast back whatever visual, social, and emotional cues he was given. He had yet to endure the loss of a loved one, and despite death's inevitability, it being part of life and all that, we saw no reason to involve him. Like the school, we felt the best thing was to keep quiet. It could be addressed if anything untoward occurred.

A few days later the school sent home another letter. The other parents had, as was their right, been discussing the suicide with their children, which, of course, caused the news to spread throughout the school. The administrators conceded that silence was no longer an option, and engaged a therapist to come to talk to the kids and to observe their responses. Soon after, I spoke with my son of death for the first time. I explained it as best I could—which is to say, not well—and he lobbed questions about the fates of grandparents and pets, of me and his mother, of him, of what would become of us all, until his curiosity, thankfully, faded.

Related Story

When Newtown happened, again I had to decide what to say. I assumed my son had now grown too old—six going on 15—to ignore the subject. My ex-wife disagreed, though, and asked that I wait for him to mention the massacre. I wasn't opposed. Kids are unpredictable and enigmatic animals—the more I know them the less I understand their minds. Often it works best to meet their needs only if those are explicitly known. I wasn't optimistic in this case, though. The Newtown atrocity was too public—the radio blared its horrid truths, images of the aftermath burst from the television. The fear of murder seemed everywhere. He couldn't help but notice.

And maybe he did. Maybe his school cronies batted it around in the riot of the play yard. Maybe his first-grade teacher, whom he adores, made some reference to it. I don't know. He never said anything. So neither did I.

Did it cause any change to my approach to his television watching or video game playing? No. His habits have changed these past months, but the massacre didn't figure into it. More important was his two-year-old sister's newfound attachment to televised entertainment. Because of it, and in those moments when my son and his sister are allowed control of the TV (generally, I rule the remote), they watch at her level, not his. That means an awful lot of Curious George and Martha Speaks and Sesame Street and no Star Wars: Clone Wars or Para-Norman. Newtown, or any other tragic act of violence, did not spur me to remove violent images from his purview—his sister did.

Presumably, all this speaks to some flaw in my parenting philosophy. Allowing the older kid to watch only programs suitable for the younger is hardly a winning technique to promote happiness, emotional stability, and early admission to Harvard. Yet what possible role could something like Newtown, however tragic, play in guiding my choices for my son?

I don't let him watch violent or scary movies because they might scare him or upset him. I don't let him play video games because he becomes a brat when I tell him to stop. The world will do as it must. I'll take care of my own.

–Theodore

My daughter had a couple friends from the first grade over to play at some point during the interminable winter break. My son, all of four years old, was excited enough about having guests over that he broke out his complete toy-gun arsenal: two miniature plastic M16s with neon pink barrels, a broken plastic pistol and a couple Star Wars blasters. The mother of one of the children, drinking coffee with me, didn't seem much concerned until her child picked up a gun and pointed it at my son. "Now," she said rather tightly, "we don't point guns at people."

But where should the kid point the gun? Into the air like the honor guard at a funeral? Into the ground? Wouldn't you be concerned if in your child's imagination, all he could think to do was fire warning shots into the dirt?

No. If you have a toy weapon, you shoot people with it. That's what children have been doing since the Bronze Age. I say this coming from a family of pacifist ministers—one of whom told me of friends many years ago who forbade toy guns in the house until they found their toddler making a gun out of slices of bread. The urge to act out violence is, well, baked into us.

So I am not sympathetic to the administration's handwringing calls for research into violent video games. It seems like a smokescreen for the coming fecklessness the White House knows it will be showing on the real gun issue.

Nor I am not that concerned about the idea of my children watching violent movies either. Bambi, after all, was listed by Time magazine as one of the top 25 Horror Movies of all time. And kids are naturally attracted to themes of violence and death. We may think the mental lives of our children are full of unicorns prancing in the meadows, but there's a lot of mayhem on their minds, too.

Lord knows I have no special insights into what turns play-shooters into actual shooters. But if you love your kids and treat them and your spouse well, I'd bet you can play Halo all day long and they wouldn't end up killers.

I am much more worried, then, about the new poll that says the NRA is more popular than Hollywood. Because, at risk of making a violently obvious point, mass violence on the screen is a lot more benign than the ability to unleash mass violence in real life.

People have their frustrations. Even toddlers smolder with rage. Teenagers and young adults all the more so. The real tragedy isn't that we let them act these frustrations out through entertainment, it's that we give them access to powerful real weaponry that can turn their passing mental stormclouds into actual, widespread death. People are going to point guns at each other. It's our job to make sure they're toy guns.

–Nathan

A couple of weeks ago in her pre-K class, my daughter Sasha created a book called "All About Me." Illustrated by Sasha, it featured captions, transcribed by her teacher, such as "I want to be a princess when I grow up" and "My favorite animal is a giraffe." One particular page caught my eye, however. "My wish," began the lines, below her drawing of what I assume is our family, "is for Jewish people to eat turkey so they can grow up big."

Since then, not a day has passed without my wondering giddily at what was going through her mind. Some kind of conflation of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving? But those were well over a month ago. In fact, it's a kind of confounding bit of prose—there is no way to try to understand it, and all I can really do is marvel at the impenetrable genius of her thinking. Sasha dictated those words to her teacher because she lives in her own world, paying attention only to the things she chooses to, and letting her imagination run wild. That is Sasha.

And that is why, in aftermath of the Newtown shootings, I felt perfectly comfortable leaving the radio on all the time, tuned to the unsettling NPR reports of precisely what had happened in Connecticut. Occasionally, Sasha would overhear a word she knew and liked and bring my attention to it—"They said New York City!" she'd call out—but as far as I could tell, she wasn't picking up the import of the broadcasts. Even though, on the day of the shooting, her class had practiced hiding, it didn't mean anything to her. It was a fun game, and nothing more.

I, too, was a lot like this as a kid (okay, as an adult, too). The world existed only when I chose to consciously observe it, and when I didn't I retreated into my imagination, concocting stories and characters and ideas that bore little relation to the reality that surrounded me. I saw plenty of violent cartoons—I particularly remember watching Robotech and realizing that it was the first animated show I'd seen where people actually died—and yet retained my innocence. As a geeky teenager, I watched A Clockwork Orange and Reservoir Dogs and played the first generation of first-person shooters, and yet did not become a mass murderer.

And so Sasha, too, has a great deal of freedom in what she watches and how she plays. If she and her friends want to pretend to kill each other, then someone's going to end up pretend-dead. If she wants to watch Star Wars, I'll happily arrange a screening. I'm not worried. At some point years from now, the reality of death will dawn upon her, and the consequences of violence may shock her for the first time in her life, but until then, I'm willing to let her be a child, ecstatic in her own ignorance.

Of course, there's a flipside to this as well: other kids. I don't know what makes some kids into bullies, or killers, or just run-of-the-mill unthinking jerks, although I highly doubt it's any of the media-Hollywood scapegoats. But I do know they exist, and I'm far more concerned about protecting my daughter, and her bubble of pure fantasy, from them—from their taunts, their fists, and their guns.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough,and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.

As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.

He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. “My mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren’t doing so great,” he writes. “We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other ‘issues.’ ”)

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.